Scan capture: one photo, taken where you're standing

Nobody searches for an app to identify antiques by photo while sitting at a desk. They search for it crouched in a stranger's dining room with a marked plate in one hand, a queue forming at the till, and a printed price sticker that says four dollars. The question is small and urgent: is this actually antique or just old, and do I put it back.

The usual tools fail at that exact moment for the same reason. General image search is trained on the whole internet, so it answers a photo of a nineteenth century transferware plate with pages of modern reproductions that happen to look similar. Reference charts and hallmark indexes are genuinely good, but they assume you already know whether you are looking at a silver mark, a pottery mark or an importer's stamp, and they assume you have ten minutes. Posting to a collector forum works beautifully and arrives two days after the sale ended.

So the friction is rarely the identification itself. It is capture: getting a usable photo of the right part of the object into the right kind of tool before the moment passes. That is the job this feature does, and it is why Patina is built as something you open on the phone already in your pocket rather than something you plan a trip around.

We should be equally plain about what a photo can and cannot settle. Patina returns maker, era and origin as a second opinion, with a confidence level attached and a persistent note that the result is an AI estimate rather than an expert appraisal. It never returns a dollar value. Identification is our job; valuation belongs to an appraiser, and we say so on every result screen.

A photo of someone's estate sale is still your photo, so here is the handling, plainly.

• The photo you scan and its identification result are stored while your account exists, because that is what makes your scan history work.
• Your name, email address and password hash are stored to create your account and sign you in.
• Scan photos are processed by an AI model from Anthropic to identify the object. Subscription payments run through Stripe, so card details never touch our servers.
• The application and its database are hosted on Amazon Web Services in the United States. There is no EU or UK data residency option today.
• To delete your account, write to the contact address on our website from your account email. We remove the account, its photos and its scan history within 30 days.

We hold no security certification or audit, there is no self serve deletion or history export inside the app yet, and we publish no uptime commitment. Those are gaps, not features, and we would rather list them here than let you assume otherwise.

Patina is not open to the public yet. We are building toward the version described on this page, and the waitlist is how you hear when scanning opens and how you tell us which objects keep defeating you, whether that is unreadable silver hallmarks, pottery marks with numbers underneath, or furniture with no mark at all.

If you want the short version to take with you: Patina is made to answer a photo of the thing in front of you with a maker, an era, an origin and an honest confidence level, and to point you at an appraiser rather than guess when the photo is not enough.